Dr. Antonia Avila Flores, a researcher at the National Biotechnology Centre of the Spanish National Research Council, and recipient of the Rafael del Pino oncology research grant, continued in 2011 with the research project “Role of the DGK enzyme in tumour transformation: tumour suppression or proto-oncogene”.
The use of specific inhibitors for this enzyme has managed to stop, in the experiments carried out in this research, the growth of tumours in mice that had previously been inoculated with cancer cells. These results indicate that the DGK enzyme is a good target for the development of anti-tumour therapies.
The research aims to evaluate the role of some of the signalling pathways that determine malignant transformation on the expression of DGK.